1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the creation of on-demand business systems, and more particularly, to a novel application that provides business to information technology (IT) transformation and vice-versa.
2. Description of the Prior Art
An “on demand business” is one that integrates its business processes end-to-end across its enterprise as well as with its trading partners such that it can respond with speed and agility to changing business conditions. This requires tight integration between the operational specification of a business and its execution mechanisms.
Model-driven architectures (MDA) have been proposed by the Object Management Group (OMG) which is a consortium that produces and maintains computer industry specifications for interoperable enterprise applications. Model-driven architectures are proposed to reinforce the use of an enterprise architecture strategy and to enhance the efficiency of software development. The key to MDA lies in three factors: 1) the adoption of precise and complete semantic models to specify a system and its behavior; 2) the usage of data representation interchange standards; and 3) the separation of business or application logic from the underlying platform technology.
Perhaps the most important is the model representations. Models can be specified from different views: the business analyst's or the IT architect's view, and they can be represented at different levels of abstraction. MDA distinguishes between platform-independent (PIM) and platform-specific (PSM) models, but other models may be used to describe the different aspects of a system.
For example, on the PIM side, business process models are used to reflect a business analyst's or consultant's view of a business process. Typical representatives of these models are the ARIS tool set by IDS Scheer (as described in A. W. Scheer, F. Abolhassan, W. Jost, and M. Kirchner Business Process Excellence—ARIS in Practice. Springer, 2002), the ADF approach by Holosofx/IBM (as described in E. Deborin et al. Continuous Business Process Management with HOLOSOFX BPM Suite and IBM MQSeries Workflow IBM Redbooks, 2002.) or UML2 activity models (Unified modeling language superstructure, version 2.0. 2nd revised submission to OMG RFP ad/00-09-02, 2003). On the PSM side, several models are employable such including IT architectural models and IT deployment models. An IT architectural model adopts a specific IT architectural approach. For example, a service-oriented architecture can be based on Web services (as described in E. Christensen, F. Curbera, G. Meredith, and S. Weerawarana, The web services description language WSDL http://www-4.ibm.com/software/solutions/webservices/resources.html, 2001) or an ERP architecture can be based on workflows (as described in F. Leymann and D. Roller. Production Workflow. Prentice Hall, 2000). Thus, the IT architectural model will comprise certain types of architecture (or platform)-specific IT solution components such as Web services or workflows, but it will still be platform-independent in the sense that it abstracts from a (vendor-) specific runtime platform. Under this point of view, IT architectural models combine aspects of PSMs and PIMs.
Besides being representative of a system, a model must be further analyzable by algorithmic methods in order to be useful. For example, the fundamental properties of the behavior of a system should be verifiable in a model, and different models of the same system should be “linked” in a way that relevant changes in one model can be propagated to the other models to keep the model set consistent.
Thus, as model-driven architectures aim at spanning the life cycle of a system from modeling and design to component construction, assembly, integration, deployment, management, monitoring and evolution, it would be highly desirable to provide system tools and algorithmic techniques that support the evolution of models and the consistency of different modeling views of the same system. Although models can evolve independently of each other and one model might represent system aspects that are irrelevant for another model, fundamental features of a system will be present in all models. It is therefore necessary to identify these fundamental features, to detect feature changes in a model and to propagate those changes automatically to the other system models.
Thus, it would be highly desirable to provide a solution based on model-driven transformations between PIM and PSM applications.